shaken by the violence of existing for only you
by PoeticallyPathetic19
Summary: Dean's reflection on things from 'What Is and What Never Should Be'.


"You know what I realized?" Dean asked softly, knowing by his brother's uneven breaths that he was still very much awake. Watching Dean nervously, as if he expected the older man to bolt. Find the first crossroads demon and turn their worlds upside down.

"What?" Sam answered after a beat, hesitance clear in his voice.

"As much as I hate what this did to us," Dean said. "Losing mom. I…"Dean licked his lips and slid further beneath the motel blankets, blinking back the fresh sting of tears. "I'm really glad things turned out this way. With us, I mean."

Sam huffed a quiet breath and Dean could almost see the tilt of his mouth, soft smile playing across his lips. "Me, too, Dean."

Dean nodded, figuring his brother could see the small movement from his own bed only feet away. He'd spent a lot of time thinking about that. Weighing their lives now to the lives they would have had if the demon hadn't taken it away from them. Maybe he'd feel differently if he didn't know what it was like to have that responsibility on his shoulders, to remember the reassuring weight of his brother's body pressed to his chest as he carried him out of the house, wide eyes blinking so trustingly up at him. But as it was, he did know.

He knew what it was like to save Sam, to protect him. To clean scrapes and cuts, to kiss away nightmares and tears. His brother always crying out for him in the night, no matter what awful thing Dean had said to him that day. Heated and only half meaning it. He knew what it was like to see Sam's heart break, and what it was like to see it heal, too. He knew the triumphant look in his brother's eyes, cheeks flushed as he mastered moves dad had thought weren't possible for him, given his awkwardness as a kid and as a teenager.

Dean knew all of it. All the good, all the bad. Everything that had ever happened to Sam, Dean had been there in some respect. Even when Sam had been away at Stanford, Dean was still there. Watching his brother from across the quad as he fit in so seamlessly, as if their life-Dean's life-had never before existed for him. Dean had seen Sam's dorm, and then his apartment lights flicker on in the middle of the night. His brother as sleepless as ever. Nothing really ever changing in Sam's habits but the important things, like the people and the places. The cross country road trips to almost Ivy League.

There'd been a lot of pain down the road they'd taken. A lot of fights and angry words that had never meant more than _I don't know how to make this right_, but there had always been their bond, unbreakable and certain as the life they led. And Dean didn't know how to live without that.

He hated the person he'd become in that other life. Taking pleasure in stealing the simplest pleasures in Sam's life. Making it his life's mission to destroy Sam's happiness, no matter how much his brother gave. The way Sam had shied away from his touch, completely caught off guard by Dean's affections, no matter how small.

It still stung to think of the way Sam had spoke to him. So cool and closed off, calling Dean right out. And it didn't matter to Dean how perfect everything else had seemed. How mom was still alive, how he'd had a beautiful, successful girl who loved him, and years more with both his parents than he'd ever hoped for. None of that had mattered when he couldn't even say, with absolute certainty, that Sam was glad to have him as a brother. To know that Sam would always claim him as one, in the face of anything. Like he could now.

"That's not you, Dean," Sam said, startling Dean from his thoughts, voice too loud in the near silent room, interrupted only by the quiet whirring of the air conditioner and their breaths. "That person, whatever happened there, that's not you. That's not us."

"I know," Dean said. But it didn't make it any easier to deal, because that was Dean. Not the Dean he was now, the one that couldn't live without Sam, the one that would die to keep him alive. But still a Dean, the Dean he was meant to be before their lives had been stolen. And really, didn't that say something about Dean all together?

"You don't know that we would even-"

"Yeah, Sam," Dean interrupted. "I do. I do know."

"Does it matter?" Sam asked a second later. "That's not who you are now. Why does it matter who you could have been?"

Dean didn't answer, the weight on his shoulders making him feel too heavy to even shrug. Sam was right, it didn't really matter, that wasn't their lives, but it still made Dean sick to think that was what they would have become, instead of this. That it had only been their mother's death that really and truly made them brothers.


End file.
